Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (original) (raw)
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Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture
Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation. Edited by Margaret King, 2013
Early modern letter writing spanned literary and nonliterary, public and private, elite and popular culture as no other scriptural practice did. As documents, letters record both historical and linguistic data. In form and function, they bridge to modern journalistic media, and to literary genres like essays, diaries, and novels. The letter is also peculiarly related to oral discourse. The ancients theorized letters in works on rhetoric. Medieval letter writers drew upon theories of oratory, establishing in the late 11th century a standardized, five-part letter structure that endured well into early modernity. And humanists cast letters as conversations between absent friends. An explosive growth in letter writing and a rethinking of epistolary practices took place in Europe between the 14th and the 16th centuries, due to four contributing factors: (1) Banking, industry, and trade networks intensified exchanges of goods and information among increasingly global markets. Merchants' practical needs spurred a significant rise in literacy (and letter writing), for the first time realized in vernaculars, rather than Latin.
The Death of the Letter? Epistolary Intent, Letterness and the Many Ends of Letter-Writing
Cultural Sociology
Is the letter now 'dead', in terminal decline because of the impact of new digital technologies? Such arguments raise important points. However, they fail to distinguish between prevailing genre conventions for letter-writing in different time periods and the underlying 'epistolary intent' and 'letterness' involved, and so overstate the newness of the changes discussed. Examples of overtime departures from 'the letter' but which display clear epistolary intent and deploy inventive forms of letterness are discussed, including the letters of Olive Schreiner, St Paul's epistles, communications between Roman legionaries, Second World War love letters, an exchange involving mathematicians, and student emails.
Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014
Letters are creation of human interaction, and thus dialogical. So, a letter is where relationships live, between the writer and reader. The very process of writing a letter is a way in which they memorialize and contextualise their relationship. The study of these relationships shape academic interests across multiple disciplines culturally, literarily, historically, anthropologically or philosophically, along with related concerns, such as ethical issues and methodological difficulties. In titling the volume, Approaching Letters and Letter Writing, we have drawn attention to the way in which we scrutinize letters and letter writing from different perspectives. Although there are a variety of approaches to the study of letters and letter writing, this volume will focus on the following scopes: the form of the material and the immateriality, the private space and public implication, as well as the individual narratives and the cultural interpretation.
Traditional, Practical, Entertaining: Two Early English Letter Writing Manuals
Rhetorica-a Journal of The History of Rhetoric, 2008
Two of the most noteworthy and successful vernacular rhetoric manuals printed in sixteenth-century England are actually writing manuals, books on how to compose letters: The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568) translated by William Fulwood, and The English Secretorie (1586), by Angel Day. Both works reflected and influenced tastes and literacy habits in the book-reading public, and reveal a wider range of cultural engagement than has previously been thought. In particular, three facets can be identified as likely to have stirred reader interest. In their theoretical underpinnings, the books offer vernacular learners a connection with both the humanist and dictaminal epistolary traditions that formed the core of prestige, Latin-based education. In their focus on practical letter exchanges that carry familial and social significance for the middle class, exemplified in a large collection of model letters, the books provide means for English speakers to maintain and possibly advance their social status. And in the model letters themselves, readers would have found texts with proto-fictional elements that could be enjoyed as entertainment, particularly of the amatory type. Understanding the varied appeals of these two books helps us fill out the larger picture relating to how vernacular literacy was valued, developed, and applied.
Letter-Writing: Between the Art of Literature and Communication
Nadzieje upadającego świata: nadzieja w chrześcijańskiej epistolografii łacińskiej IV i V wieku, 2019
The chapter concerns letter-writing from a theoretical per- spective. It dwells upon the book by the Polish literary theorist Stefania Skwarczyńska. Skwarczyńska’s book "Teoria listu" ["Letter Theory"] was published in Polish in 1937 and has not been translated into English. The book was a very modern take on letter-writing at the time it was published, and even now it can still be considered a milestone in epistolary theory, and a gold mine of ideas for systematic research in and sustained critical scrutiny of letter-writing from philosophical, historical, and cultural perspective(s).